ild with a bowl
in his hand who looked as if he might have been going to the grocer's.

"Oh, that boy is going to buy wine."

The Chinese have never yet realized what a national evil liquor may
become. They have little wine shops in the great cities, but they have
no drinking houses corresponding to the saloon, and it is not uncommon
to see a child going to the wine shop to fetch a bowl of wine. The
Buddhist priest indulges with the same moderation as the official class
or gentry. Indeed most of the drunkenness we read about in Chinese
books is that of poets and philosophers, and in them it is, if not
commended, at least not condemned. The attitude of literature towards
them is much like that of Thackeray towards the gentlemen of his day.

The child constructed the picture of a Buddhist priest, who, with staff
in hand, and a mug of wine, was viewing the beautiful mountains in the
distance. He then changed it to one in which an intoxicated man was
leaning on a boy's shoulder, the inscription to which said: "Any one is
willing to assist a drunken man to return home."

"This," he went on as he changed his blocks, "is a picture of Li Pei,
China's greatest poet. He lived more than a thousand years ago. This
represents the closing scene in his life. He was crossing the river in
a boat, and in a drunken effort to get the moon's reflection from the
water, he fell overboard and was drowned." The child pointed to the
sail at the same time, repeating the following:

The sail being set,
He tried to get,
The moon from out the main.

I noticed a large number of boat scenes and induced the child to
construct some of them for me, which he was quite willing to do,
explaining them as he went as readily as our children would explain Old
Mother Hubbard or the Old Woman who Lived in her Shoe, by seeing the
illustrations.

Constructing one he repeated a verse somewhat like the following:

Alone the fisherman sat,
In his boat by the river's brink,
In the chill and cold and snow,
To fish, and fish, and think.

Then he turned over to two on opposite pages, and as he constructed
them he repeated in turn:

In a stream ten thousand li in length
He bathes his feet at night,

While on a mount he waves his arms,
Ten thousand feet in height.

The ten thousand li in one couplet corresponds to the ten thousand feet
in the other, while the bathing of the